Partial coordination. II. A preliminary evaluation and failure analysis

Partial coordination is a new method for cataloging documents forsubject access. It is especially designed to enhance the precision of documentsearches in online environments. This paper reports a preliminaryevaluation of partial coordination which shows promising results comparedwith full text retrieval. We also report the difficulties in empiricallyevaluating the effectiveness of automatic full-text retrieval in contrast tomixed methods such as partial coordination which combine humancataloging with computerized retrieval. Based on our study we proposeresearch in this area will substantially benefit from a common framework forfailure analysis and a common data set. This will allow information retrievalresearchers adapting "library style" cataloging to large electronic documentcollections, as well as those developing automated or mixed methods, todirectly compare their proposals for indexing and retrieval. This paperconcludes by suggesting guidelines for constructing such a testbed.